Back to an ominous oxymoron

The BJP’s star campaigner, Narendra Modi, has been wowing audiences with his mantra of effective and clean governance, economic growth, development and a muscular approach to internal and external security challenges. His scathing criticism of the Congress for its failures on these fronts wins him plaudits too. To be sure, his bragging about Gujarat’s achievements under his stewardship of the state has been held up to critical scrutiny which suggests that his claims are not bereft of hype and hoopla. But debates on this score focus on facts and statistics, on varying, even rival, interpretations of empirical evidence and not on interminable arguments about identity politics.

Had Modi stuck to this path in a steadfast manner, he would have ensured that the election campaign is conducted on issues that poll after opinion poll suggest are of priority concern to voters: inflation, especially the rise in food prices, the weakening of the rupee, poor physical and social infrastructure, few job opportunities, inept governance and so forth. This is the kind of language that goes down well in urban and rural India alike, particularly among the nation’s bourgeoning youthful population. It responds to a discourse that is specific, not general, concrete, not abstract, precise, not rooted in motherhood principles, innovative, not one stuck in the grooves of the rhetoric of the past.

But here is the rub. To keep his ‘core’ constituency happy, Modi cannot but help airing his pet peeves. Let us set aside for the moment his clumsy effort to abdicate his responsibility in the 2002 communal massacres. The ‘puppy’ analogy was, at best, insensitive, and, at worst, an expression of ancient hatreds and prejudices cultivated by his ideological mentors in Nagpur. But it is his self-definition as a ‘Hindu Nationalist’ that must set alarm bells ringing for it reverberates with ominous echoes of the infamous two-nation theory that gave short shrift not only to the religious and cultural diversity of India but also to the eclectic, multilayered nature of Hinduism itself.

This explains why some of the finest minds in our country, steeped in our philosophical and spiritual traditions, were wary of the very idea of nationalism and, by that token, of the nation-state. Tagore, for instance, cautioned time and again that nationalism — let alone Hindu nationalism — is a menace that was at the bottom of India’s troubles. Why? Because its sole purpose was to organise people to attain political objectives — strength and efficiency to develop military might and ensure commercial gain — at the expense of the ‘higher nature’ of Indians that favoured the social regulation of differences and the spiritual unity of humankind.

Towards this end, Tagore explained, a number of great spiritual teachers sought to set at naught all differences between people “by the overflow of our consciousness of God”. He went on to add that India’s history has not been one of the rise and fall of kingdoms, or of fights for political supremacy, but of “our social life and the attainment of our spiritual attainments”. He admitted that India had made grave errors in setting up boundary walls between races and in the process “crippled her children’s minds and narrowed their lives in order to fit them in her social forms”. Even so, for centuries she undertook new experiments and carried out adjustments to promote tolerance and justice.

In the year before a Hindu fanatic assassinated him, Mahatma Gandhi harped on these very themes in his daily prayer meetings. India was then reeling from the horrendous aftermath of Partition. Time and again he stressed that while he called himself a sanatani Hindu, he could never be a party to Hindu Raj. “That way lies destruction.” The Mahatma would doubtless have been pained to learn that more than 60 years later terms like ‘Hindu nationalism’ — or any other nationalism that bears a religious prefix — are still bandied about in our public life. Modi is within his rights to call himself a Hindu and a nationalist. But the moment he uses the former as an adjective and the latter as a noun he runs the risk of violating the very ethos of our Cons-titution that bonds us as citizens of our one and indivisible republic.